


Turkish Acquiescence

by reogulus



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Bad Guys Made Them Do It, Captivity, Darkest Night treat, Dubious Consent, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Sexual Dysfunction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:08:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26096128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reogulus/pseuds/reogulus
Summary: Sometimes, as it will soon become apparent to Roman, it’s the deal that finds you, whether you want to walk away or not.
Relationships: Eduard Asgarov/Roman "Romulus" Roy
Comments: 1
Kudos: 13
Collections: Darkest Night 2020





	Turkish Acquiescence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [arbitrarily](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/gifts).



That would have been really traumatizing, if you weren't already so fucked up.

_This Is Not For Tears_

“Should we see if any of the other hostages want to cut a deal? This could be a bumper time for us.”

Roman was only half-kidding when he said that with a straight face—but of course, a part of him didn’t believe it or didn’t want to believe it. Logically speaking it is an ill-advised impulse: look where trying to do just one deal has landed them.

Sometimes, as it will soon become apparent to Roman, it’s the deal that finds you, whether you want to walk away or not.

The parts of his spine awkwardly arranged to fit on the hotel banquet chairs are starting to ache. Perhaps fortunately for Roman, he’s no stranger to learning lessons through pain, and this is one to remember to say the least.

And then, as if on cue, as soon as Roman starts believing that he will eventually die of back pain atop these chairs fit only for peasants, Eduard shows up and makes a beeline for their corner of the banquet hall.

“Hey man,” Roman sits up. They are both wearing the same clothes, and looking worse for wear than before. Eduard nods at him in greeting. Laird has gone to use the bathroom and Karl is lying on his side with his back to them.

“How are you guys doing?” He asks, for what feels like the tenth time tonight. Roman's lost count a while ago.

“Well,” Roman shrugs, arches his brows and makes a face. “You good, man?”

“Good, good, all good. So, um, listen,” Eduard leans in closer, blinking rapidly, “look, we told Zeynal what you said about the concerns of blocking and the takeover bid, and it seems to have allayed most of his concerns about the deal. But, you know, everything is still in play, and—”

Before Eduard can finish the sentence, the man of the hour walks into the room. “Hi, hello, I’m so sorry. Roman Roy?”

“Fuck,” Roman swears quietly under his breath. Zeynal is looking right at him—there’s no point in playing coy. He raises his hand, as if he’s replying to a teacher taking attendance in a classroom: “Here.”

“Follow us, please.” The man calls out. Karl has jerked awake and gotten on his feet. But one of the men patrolling the room with a gun comes over, shakes his head firmly and nudges Karl to sit where he was. Roman frowns. Karl, in his reddish leathery skin, has gone pale as a sheet.

“It’s gonna be fine,” Roman says and turns to him, but decides against patting Karl on the shoulder, since the armed man has not yet left his side.

Eduard, still sitting, gives him a small nod and a smaller smile. “Good luck.”

“Good luck to you too,” Roman picks his suit jacket off the back of the chair. Looks like he’s really doing this alone, and that’s—fine. He’s alive. The deal is still on the table, and no one is getting shot so long as that’s the case. There is no better alternative he can think of.

He walks over to Zeynal’s side, tries his best to mirror Zeynal’s—dare he say it—friendly smile. But then Zeynal looks past Roman’s shoulder, and calls out to Eduard:

“And Mr. Asgarov, you as well, please.”

Eduard, who’s turned sideway in the chair and craned his neck to watch them, seems to be caught off-guard. To be sure, Roman has always known Eduard is scared shitless as much as he is, this is not the kind of thing you get used to even as you convince yourself that it is the devil you know. But the look of genuine confusion that flashes across Eduard’s face for a brief fraction of a second still sends Roman’s stomach sinking immediately. His instincts tell him he should try to stand taller.

“Right, okay,” Eduard gets up from the chair and strides over to join them, doing up a button on his blazer. They file out of the room, flanked by Zeynal’s men and their guns.

They are led into a suite that looks almost identical to the one where Roman was doing the pitch in the morning, before the interruption occurred and everything became what it is now. There are less flowers—correction, there are no flowers—in this room. The tables, couches and armchairs are arranged in the same layout as Roman remembers from the morning. There are the mahogany wood and marble accents, the mirror above the mantel piece, the set of inoffensive and therefore forgettable hotel art hanging on the wall. If he can somehow block out the presence of guns in the room, this almost feels like an actual reset of the day. Roman walks over to the coffee table where he stood in the morning. He did well in the morning—he can do it again.

Zeynal waits by the door, watches as everyone settles into position. And then he closes the door and locks it—Roman keeps his head down, but the click of the lock and the chain is loud and clear.

“So, how are you feeling?” Zeynal smiles again. Roman looks to Eduard, who’s sitting next to him on the couch, where Laird and Karl had been. But Eduard keeps looking straight ahead, his legs crossed, one pant leg riding up to reveal the smooth length of his ankle.

“Good, yeah, it’s good to be here.” Roman takes a pause. Zeynal is still looking at him expectantly, and no one else is speaking up to fill the silence. “Um…do you guys have the deck from the morning? I assume Eduard and his guys probably gave you a copy. I can spin through the—”

But Zenyal cocks his head to look at Eduard instead. “So, you haven’t told him yet?”

Roman looks to Eduard with a slight frown of puzzlement. Something about the bemused politeness in Zenyal’s tone goes in the direction of increasingly unsettling, and Roman doesn’t like it, to say the least. Eduard seems to have paled a bit, the color visibly draining from his cheeks.

“I…” Eduard clears his throat, blinks twice, his eyes wide. It makes Roman wonder if he is having an invisible panic attack, like the one Karl had. “I haven’t had a chance to discuss with Roman in private, no. I thought maybe we can still negotiate—”

Whatever he meant to say next was cut off by a raucous chorus of laughter from the men in the room, beginning and ending with Zeynal’s. Eduard seems ashen, akin to the light tweed of his suit.

“I’m sorry, young Asgarov, but it is non-negotiable. Why don’t you go to the suite next door to _talk_ about it now?”

Later, it will dawn on Roman that the strange emphasis placed on the second verb in that second sentence is something of premonition. And it will be too little, too late.

They exit the pitch room, back in that godforsaken hallway again. And then Roman follows Eduard into yet another room in this fucking hotel. In the span of those few minutes, he has thought about being clever with his opening line.

As soon as Eduard closes and locks the door behind them, it becomes clear to Roman that there is no cleverness left to be dredged up. So he says the least original thing that everyone else has been saying all day:

“Eduard, what the fuck is going on?”

“They, uh…” Eduard pauses and rubs his eyes, and only then does Roman notice their puffiness. It draws a tightness inside Roman’s chest. “Fuck. I’m sorry, Rome. I wish it doesn’t have to involve you, I really do.”

Roman frowns. “You mean like…more than I am…already involved in all this?” Some relentlessly wishful part of him (the spoiled brat, in Gerri’s words) is expecting Eduard to provide an immediate and negative response to this question.

But of course, Eduard nods, as slowly and gravely as Roman has ever seen him nod. “It requires a different kind of involvement than what you’ve been through so far, yes. I need you to help me save my dad’s life, and any hope that my family will have some kind of a future in this country after tonight.”

He pauses to swallow, Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. His large, puffy brown eyes are pinned on Roman’s face. The look in those eyes is some unknowable mix of utter terror and careful hope.

Roman feels his breathing getting labored. In a matter of minutes, the air between them has grown much, much thinner.

“Are they gonna kill your dad?” Roman asks quietly. As the words leave his mouth, his mind conjures up only an image of Logan, holding court in his office chair. He’s never met Eduard’s dad.

Eduard closes his eyes, exhales deeply. His long, dark eyelashes flutter as his chest heaves. That is the first image to be burned into Roman’s memory. It’s the first specimen—the butterfly wings aflutter, thin and perfectly gossamer-like, pinned in place neatly underneath an immaculate glass frame.

“Unless we fuck, yeah,” at last, he says, pointing to a red blinking light placed inches above the doorframe.

Roman knows that if he had asked, Eduard would have told him. _Why?_ But such a question would have been entirely unnecessary. Roman Roy knows a thing or two about screenwriting, of course. A lesser writer’s pen would have guided him toward an exposition at length, explaining how homophobia and sadism came together to concoct the perfect fuck-or-your-dad-dies scenario, how the search warrant for the Asgarov family’s bedrooms and offices turned up a disappointing dearth of materials suitable for blackmail, et cetera et cetera. But Roman Roy of all people also knows that, you don’t need a reason to want to see a person humiliated. To see someone made small and reduced beyond the possibility of coming out from under the thumb of some power, you only ever need to make them do something that they will never forget. And everything else, the audience, the gambit, is a mere conduit.

“Can we pour ourselves something before we get into it all?”

That’s the question Roman asks instead of _why_. Eduard’s jaw hangs open slightly, but eventually he picks up on the acquiescence couched in the question. Without another word, he strides over to the kitchenette.

Roman feels strangely calm as he watches Eduard rummage through the mini-bar listlessly. For once he gets to be the conduit rather than the object, and there is a certain novelty in this situation that excites him. Coaxing a personal trainer into giving a handy for a contract extension is one way to abuse power with impunity. But coercing the heir of a prominent political player into taking a dick to save his dad’s life? If he gets to walk out of this hotel alive, Roman might just be incentivized to do the deal with Zeynal for reasons other than wishing to avoid certain death.

“Well, cheers,” Eduard says, cheerless. He opens two mini bottles of vodka and hands one over to Roman. By this point Roman is certain that they both know too well that in every permutation of how this may end, it will end worse for Eduard than for Roman. Invariably.

It wasn’t as if they’ve never talked about this before. It came up once, the last time Roman was on this side of the Atlantic, diligently courting Eduard on Logan’s instructions and Gerri’s crib sheet, at the fucking hell hole in Mayfair. They were in the lounge, on the fourth bottle of champagne, after the lovely and scrumptious dinner with Eduard’s uncle and aunt who had been nothing but disgustingly enthused and kind all evening. It’s a warm reception, the kind that feels a lot like the heat of hell fire.

_Have you ever done anything with a guy before?_

Of course, Roman didn’t mind telling Eduard about Brex. The handjobs were all but ancient history; it's been a long, long time since he had Brex’s hand anywhere near his genitals, clothed or not. Besides, Brex probably already received a phone call from Gerri’s assistant about a very generous cash injection of hush money, as the unintended beneficiary of the oppo research.

As expected, Eduard didn’t have much of a reaction to Brex. He held the flute of champagne steady by the stem, eyes cast down at the golden bubbles with something of a pensive look.

 _Everything we must hide from our fathers to get what we are supposedly born into_ , he said, and Roman understood that to be a concluding statement, not open to further debate. Then they went back to talking about all the women who wanted to sleep with Eduard over two days at Argestes.

Eduard takes off his watch. The metal strap makes a quiet clinking sound as he sets it down on the side table. He’s taken off his suit jacket already, draped it over the back of an armchair. They’ve made their way to the part of the suite with the king-sized bed, and of course there is a red light blinking overhead above the doorway there, too.

Roman is sitting on the edge of the bed. The taste of alcohol on his tongue is wearing off. He’s never really liked getting drunk or high, that’s always been Kendall’s damage; but this is one of those rare things for which Roman is mildly concerned about being too sober.

“Did Zeynal give you a script for this? Like, what they want you to do, exactly?”

“Probably better to just let me,” Eduard purses his lips, makes a gesture toward Roman’s below-the-belt area, “take the lead on this. You don’t need the details. They said I just need to make you come.”

“Right,” Roman nods and holds his tongue about going ahead without picking a safeword. Now is not the time for that particular joke. “I’ll do my best to…deliver.” And then he tries to stay very, very still as Eduard rolls up his sleeves and loosens the top buttons of his collar.

The thing Roman likes about Eduard is that Eduard is actually quite good at reading him. Roman doesn’t think he is a difficult person, so long as he is properly understood.

Whenever he was with Eduard, it was easy to act as though the whole Hearts and Hibs screw-up never happened. A lot of things feel easier when he’s with Eduard because they don’t need to be verbalized at all. Even this morning—before it all went to shit—as Roman was going through the pitch and looking at the faces of Eduard and his entourage sitting in those chairs, it didn’t feel like the kind of pitching he’s always hated. He’d really thought there was a real chance of this happening, of him pulling it off. It felt fucking real.

And now Eduard is putting a hand on his thigh, and it’s—just as real, if not more so. It feels like that moment when the rollercoaster is slowly inching towards the apex, you know the drop is coming any minute now and you are totally strapped in with nowhere left to go. That’s what it fucking feels like, when Eduard gently pushes Roman back and his torso drops back onto the mattress, Eduard’s hand pushes Roman’s shirt tail out of the way, and his palm hovers above the bulge of his underwear—the hesitation lasts but a second, but Roman sees it nonetheless—before he closes the distance and makes contact. 

Roman tries not to let himself focus on the sensation of his penis being touched through a thin layer of cotton, because if he does, he is going to start shaking and Eduard’s fingers are as unsteady as they are. It’s no good if they both start to crack under pressure now, it will only cause the whole deed to be drawn out longer. Roman draws in a deep breath in response to Eduard’s increasingly shaky breathing, and the smell of Eduard’s cologne invades his lungs.

“Hey,” he whispers, and from between his thighs, Eduard looks up at him, his lips spit-shiny already like he’s been licking and chewing on them, hard. Roman’s heart drops—then starts to race. 

“You’re gonna be fine,” he lies to Eduard effortlessly, with the confidence of a middle child built up at the brunt end of lifelong neglect.

Eduard nods. Roman can’t tell if that’s de facto acceptance or dismissal.

They stay there for a second, both unmoving, with Eduard’s head hovered above Roman’s ribcage.

“Okay, fuck it,” eventually, Eduard says in a huff, like he’s suddenly in a hurry again. Roman feels his fingers hooking under the waistband of his boxer-briefs, the light scrape of those manicured nails against the skin on his hip, and then he becomes properly exposed.

He tries not to think about the camera in this room, how the other room must be reacting to this first appearance. He’s not anywhere close to feeling aroused.

“I’m sorry,” the words sound like they are choked out of Eduard’s windpipe. And then with a slight bob of his head, he takes Roman into his mouth.

“Why can’t you just fucking enjoy it?” Grace said, after they left the office of the therapist who did both sex therapy and couples counselling. Their driver got stuck in traffic three blocks away, so he was stuck there waiting with her on the sidewalk. Roman gave her credit for having enough discretion to say “it” out in public, not “a blowjob”, so maybe the passersby within earshot would just assume she was talking about piano recitals or Açai bowls.

It was January in New York. The setting sun was a blob of haze behind the thick cloud cover. Grace was wearing the wine red peacoat that Roman bought her for her birthday, styled with the most hideous navy-blue beret she got from some stupid vintage shop. He had in his hand a half-finished cup of almond cortado that had gone cold about an hour ago, and he kept telling himself he’d finish it but he knew he never would—a metaphor for how this relationship started to feel, how every relationship started to feel the same after a while.

“Because the premise of this whole thing,” he stuck out a gloved finger towards her, and then pointed back at himself, “continues only on an as-is basis, honey. But if it helps _you_ , we can try going to the other guy next week.”

Grace just looked at him, with that smirk of contempt that stopped Roman dead in his tracks on the night they met. But they didn’t end up going to the other guy, after all.

It's taken every iota of self-restraint Roman can muster to not push Eduard’s head off him. All he can think about is the last time someone tried to give him a blowjob—it was Grace, back before she became a total bitch, or he turned her into one—and how that did not help at all. And he almost gave her a black eye when he kept saying “I can’t do this” and struggled to get off the bed.

But last time, there were no men with guns guarding out in the hallway, no one’s dad is at risk of being murdered by the end of the day.

“Eduard, I’m not—I’m not gonna get hard like this,” After about five minutes, also known as an eternity, Roman finally muster up the energy to say the words out loud. The words come out so fast he’s slurring them, because he’s afraid if he says them any slower, they are not going to come out at all. “You need to use your hands, or I can’t come.”

And then everything stops. The feeling of someone’s mouth around his limp dick disappears. Roman counts down the seconds of the silence, staring up at the ceiling. He doesn’t think Eduard would want to look at him.

“I really thought it would be faster this way.” He hears the quiet sound of Eduard swallowing.

“Yeah, I should have told you the other part of that story, my personal trainer didn’t blow me because _I_ didn’t want it. It’s fine,” Roman props himself up on his elbows, looking at Eduard, who is pointedly not looking at him. “It’s not you, it’s me, okay, just—spit into your hand.”

Eduard exhales. “Fuck, man,” he sounds more tired than anything else, which is still a better reaction than how Grace reacted when he called it off. He slicks up his palm with spit.

“Sorry,” there are men with assault rifles standing in the hallway outside, there are cameras violating their privacy and creating blackmail as they speak, but Roman still feels like he needs to apologize.

“Will you let me jerk you off?” Tabitha asked when they were spending the night together. It was a couple of days after Tern Haven. Maybe she felt bad about aborting the morgue fantasy.

“Since you asked so nicely, no, sorry, I have a morning brief with dad and Gerri.” He wouldn’t tell her the full story about Gerri. And of course, Tab is the type who would never pry. That’s why he likes hanging out with her.

“Pretty please, then?” Tabitha poked Roman's shoulder and giggled, her fingernail digging slightly into the fabric of his shirt and the skin underneath. They were sprawled on the couch side by side, her hair still damp from the shower, and he thought about how gorgeous she is. He thought about what she said that night, about solving him. Like she fucking means it, like she fucking believes she will stick around long enough to see that day. But Roman is not a difficult person, and if that’s the version of the future she believes in, he can believe it, too.

So he took her hand in his and pressed a kiss on the back of her hand. His lips felt cold against her skin. She smelled like the perfume he bought her last week. He kept very still and imagined himself a corpse, as Tabitha inched closer and touched him with her other hand. She still felt too warm against him, and dead men are not supposed to get aroused.

It hits different as soon as Eduard’s hand wraps around the base of his cock. Roman Roy knows nothing if not his own dick.

“Fuck, okay,” Roman mutters under his breath, screws his eyes shut because he doesn’t want to think about being watched. Before long Eduard is stroking him, after giving him a good squeeze and seeing Roman arch into his grip.

Eduard is lying down beside him on the bed now—the floor was probably hurting his knees—and if Roman turns to his right just slightly, it’s almost close enough to bury his nose in Eduard’s nape and drown himself in how good his friend smells. He was only ever half-joking when he said he wanted to lick Eduard’s neck, anyway. The lines were never not blurred because Roman was exact about one thing: that was how he liked it.

“Roman, come on,” Eduard whispers to him, and it almost sounds like a beg. “I don’t want them to think we are taking too long—they’re still watching—”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Roman spits out, wraps his hand around Eduard’s hand on his cock, which has grown unmistakably hard. He doesn’t need to be reminded of their situation, the inherent fucked-upness of it, the point of no return that has been crossed long ago. From the beginning, it never would have taken much for him to come undone under the circumstances.

He had more than three decades of experience making do with too little doting. He still hasn’t figured out how to deal with too much.

He turns a bit more to face Eduard now, thrusting himself into the double-layered fist of his hand overlapping Eduard’s, their fingers getting slick with Eduard's spit and Roman's pre-come. Eduard's eyes are half-lidded, weighed down by humiliation and something like breathless wonderment. The sight of his eyelashes fluttering with every breath he's taking is almost unbearable to Roman. 

He guides Eduard’s hand, his own hand guided by the muscle memory of how he’s worked himself since he was a boy, and in between the hurried, jagged breaths from his mouth and nose against Eduard’s collar bone, he spills onto their fingers and the back of his hand. It’s been barely two minutes on the clock.

When they come out of the room, the guards in the hallway barely even look at them.

“Good luck, man,” Roman says, again—he tries to say it like he can believe luck factors into this whole thing at all.

Eduard, to his credit, still smiles like he means it. “Good luck to you too.”

Before they are escorted separate ways by Zeynal’s henchmen, Roman reaches up and gives him two gentle pats on the back of his shoulder. He somehow feels a lot bonier than before. “Go—uh, Hearts.”

“Go Hearts,” Eduard nods, his eyelashes flutter slightly as he turns to look to Roman, which makes Roman think of the specimen under the glass again—butterfly wings that won’t ever take flight. There’s nothing else to say after that.

Later, when they are _out_ out, the first thing Kendall asks is "Who'd you suck off to get out?" He's wearing a shit-eating grin, teeth glistening under the Mediterranean sun.

 _Ask and you shall receive_ , Roman thinks to himself. At least it’s easier to avoid looking at anyone in the eyes when they all have their shades on.

“Uh... Yeah, yeah. You know, they raped me a little, but I'm no hero,” Roman pauses for the tiniest swallow. He can feel everyone’s eyes on him, and in that moment the mega-yacht doesn’t feel nearly big enough. And then he leans forward to stick his chest out, blocking out that last smidge of residual shame and slipping into his old self again: “Parentheses, I'm an incredible hero.”

**Author's Note:**

> It has been my absolute pleasure to write this treat for you! Roman/Eduard is simply too irresistible in this super fucked up way. I loved exploring Roman's sexual dysfunction further via the "Bad Guys Made Them Do It" trope and I hope you enjoyed reading this!


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